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‘When Feeling Becomes Thought’: Britten, Text and Biography 1928–31
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Extract
Britten set Aschenbach's hymn to his enfranchised soul at the end of his composing life, but a conscious relationship between experience and an art that would record, analyse and confirm its integrity was present from the first and gives a revelatory quality to his voice-and-piano/small orchestra works. The first significant attempt to ‘keep account of the real’ occurs in the Hugo, Verlaine and de la Mare settings of 1928–1931, when home and life outside its sheltering bounds became for the first time polarized and opposed. In June 1928 Britten submitted an end-of-term essay on ‘Animals’ whose subversive tenor shattered his elders' golden opinions and so harshly unlearned his own illusion that the settings that follow stand to those that precede the event as sagesse stands to méconnaissance, consciousness to nescience.
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References
1 ‘When thought becomes feeling, feeling thought’ (Death in Venice, 1973, Act I, sc.7).
2 LfL, p.27 (for sigla, see Table 1).
3 In 1936–1941 and 1972–1975, for example; more ‘anonymously’ after 1945, when the insensitivities of a conscious objectors' tribunal become those of an 18th-century Moot Hall inquest, the strains and jealousies of the post-war world those of Loxford or pre-Christian Rome.
4 Assuming the summer term at South Lodge, Britten's Lowestoft prep school, began on 1 May (on the analogy of 1931, LfL, p. 174) and allowing six weeks for the topic to be set and composed, the essay must almost certainly have been conceived and written, but not yet responded to, whetvSi/iw (see below) was set on 13 and Nuits de Juin on 15/17 June (although Britten's letters and diaries are silent on the subject, see LfL, pp.91–2).
5 Sassoon, Siegfried, Vigils, 7 (1934), SSCP, p.212 Google Scholar. Sassoon's portrayal of childhood's bewilderments (recalled, like Britten's in Til for Tat, at some 40 years' remove) is so close to the composer's that it is frequently used in this study as a metonym (Britten set Sassoon's, ‘Everyone Sang’, Picture-Show, 1919, in 1930)Google Scholar.
6 Cf. Winter Words (1953).
7 ‘Slammed the gate… on my young years and started/Along the road… for freedom, empty-hearted’, Vigils, 7.
8 Verlaine, , L'Escarpolette (1872)Google Scholar.
9 Cf. Albert Herring (1947), The Prodigal Son (1968), Death inVenice.
10 Cf. Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), Owen Wingrave (1970).
11 Cf. mother and child in Das Irdische Lehen, prisoner and sweetheart in Lied des Verfolgten in Turm ( Mahler, , Des Knaben Wunderhom, 1892–1899)Google Scholar.
12 sb = semibreve, m = minim, c = crotchet, q = quaver, sq = semi-quaver.
13 In the Donne Sonnets (1945) they are a self-disgusted scourge, in Ireland's I was not sorrowful (1903) and Spleen (1913), both influential on Britten's early vocal writing (see below) they are a symbol of thwarted desire.
14 SSPP, p.15, substituting ‘music’ for ‘poetry’.
15 Preface to Les Contemplations (Hachette, 1868, p. 4)Google Scholar, the collection including L'Enfance (see below). Britten set from the 1924 OBFV (see LfL, p.92). A less detailed prosodic analysis is made of Quatre Chansons than of Tit for Tat (see below), since Britten's inexperience in handling French metre involved quite extensive editing by Colin Matthews.
16 The poem is from Les Rayons et les Ombres (1889).
17 The linkage of dusk and things unspoken of is present in A song of enchantment (see below) and ‘Out on the lawn', Spring Symphony (1949), where the awakening is Europe's.
18 Not, I think, the ‘clear light of boyhood’ (TBC, p.308); in Paul Bunyan (PB, p.48), night is a time of ambiguity, indecision and healing.
19 1914–1915 and 1927. Britten had become Bridge's pupil some six months before, and quoted from Summer and Enter Spring in the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) (LfL, p.503).
20 1913, 1920, see TMS, p.20, and Christopher Mark ( Soundings, 10, Summer 1983)Google ScholarPubMed. The orchestral-manque imagery in Quilter's Now sleeps the crimson petal (LfL, pp.64, 134) and that in Mahler's, Riickert Lieaer (1901–1902) seems no less importantGoogle Scholar.
21 Cf. the change in the ‘moral atmosphere’ from Paul Bunyan, where everything ‘I want to be’ is attainable to that of Peter Grimes; Sassoon's words are from The Heart's journey, I, SSCP, p.175.
22 LJL, p.155.
23 Cf. the trees’ berceuse in Winter Words (SS, p.44); is there also a remembrance of a babyhood when such a ‘rocking’ of one's universe had less painful connotations?
24 the m in bar 3 and 7, for example, the strength of ‘respectablility's’ appeal compared to that of chaos? (See PB, p.17, BA, p.161, and the discussion of Chanson d'Automne below).
25 In Britten's mature musical lexicon the harp characterizes a cluster of images to do with moral blame, beguilement and secret desire, the payment that knowledge exacts but also the benediction it confers [Albert Herring, The Prodigal Son, Canticle V, for example).
26 Cf. the renunciatory tropes giving the lie to reality in Ireland's Penumbra (TMS, p.25).
27 Albert Herring, Act I, sc.l, FS, p.52.
28 The viola accompanies ‘do not think ill of me’ (The Prodigal Son, RS, p.48) and the penitential decision to return home (RS, pp. 105–6).
29 If the repeated scalic figures (Pleurant…, Dis…., etc.) are successive outbreaks of rage and enquiry, are the isolated quavers at rumeurs in Nuits de Juin individual and possibly unspoken doubts (see LfL, p.395) that explode at rumeur-la here? Fauré set Sagesse as Prison in 1894 (op.83, no.l).
30 Cf. Mahler's First Symphony, and Bridge's, There is a willow grows aslant a brook (1927) (see LfL, pp.92, 503)Google Scholar.
31 Cf. Our Hunting Fathers's (1936) rats, The Turn of the Screw's schwarz-Benedicite, Death in Venice's plague.
32 ‘Still do I love…’, VS, p.15, a hrhomjejeune Credo (TBC, p.309).
33 Cf. ‘Teach me to travel far and bear my loads’, Vigils, 5, SSCP, p.211; also the games of longing and the mind. Death in Venice, Act I, sc.7, FS, pp.142–3. The (A) figures almost extinguishing the (B) after fig. 15 may also be the weight of expectations.
34 Cf. Spleen's mood of bleak entombment (TMS, p.25); also Letzte Hoffnung (Schubert, Winterreise, D.911), hope being the last leaf carried to the ground by the winter wind.
35 See n.24 above.
36 As in A song of enchantment (below), ‘Ages and ages’ have fallen.
37 Representing a ‘complete expression’ of Britten's art at that time (PN (1969)). Autumn and Vigil would have been set from the 1923 edition of de la Mare's Poems (LfL, pp.158–9). Silver, A song of enchantment and Tit for Tat from anthologies (PN (1969)); all three were first published in Peacock Pie (1913). This study considers the settings in composition order and I am grateful to the Britten-Pears Library for information about manuscript dates. Britten set four de la Mare part-songs in 1930–1932 (LfL, pp.149, 237, 250).
38 The song seems to be a summation of all the voice-andpiano techniques thus far acquired, with debts to Clair de lune (Fauré, op.46, no.2, 1887, a setting of Verlaine); de la Mare's fifth couplet is omitted and ‘silvery’ set for ‘silver’ in line 12.
39 Bonnerot, L., L'Oeuvre de Walter de la Mare (Didier, 1969) p. 62 Google Scholar.
40 Cf. SS, p.44.
41 Much more accurately conjured in the Nocturne (VS, p. 16).
42 Auden, W.H., A Choice ofde la Mare's Verse (Faber, 1963) p. 18 Google Scholar.
43 Vigils, 9, SSCP, p. 213.
44 Setting ‘cries’ for ‘screamed’ in line 7, ‘you are a-roam’ for ‘off you roam’ in line 10 and ‘thorn-sticks’ for ‘thorn-stocks’ in line 14.
45 Cf. Britten's, setting of ‘Sport’(1931)Google Scholar (from Davies, W.H., A Poet's Calendar, 1927 Google Scholar; LfL, p.155).
46 Cf. Winter Words: Wagtail and baby. Die choirmaster's burial.
47 Cf. lug (the Chariot), in Pastoral (Serenade, 1943).
48 Cf. Rats, Away! and Hawking for the Partridge, Our Hunting Fathers.
49 First published in Motley and Other Poems (1918).
50 1919; an item in Britten and Pears's early song recitals (LfL, p.1207). Cf. also Gurney, The fields are full (1919).
51 1906.
52 Bonnerot, , op.cil., p.389 Google Scholar.
53 Humphrey Carter (BB, pp.20–1) draws attention to several alleged remarks by Britten that he had suffered traumatic sexual experiences while at school.
54 First published in Poems (1906). Britten at first found his setting (originally for voice and string quartet) unsatisfactory (LJL, p.158).
55 Cf. SS, pp.37ff, TMS, Ex.1, p.23; Bridge felt that Ireland's music had a ‘heavy leaning towards tomorrow's’ (LJL, p.133).
56 Foreshadowing Batter my heart in the Donne Sonnets.
57 Ex.3 shows this ‘musical prosody’ in more detail:
58 Vigils, 9, SSCP, p. 213.
59 LfL, p.1074.
60 The Heart's Journey, II, XIII, SSCP, pp.175, 181.
61 Carter, A.E., Verlaitie: A Study in Parallels (University of Toronto Press, 1969) pp. 36–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.